Down on Earth there was also little sign of activity. It was night at Tether Control in Quito, with the time of landing set for nine the following morning. Luis Merindo, alone, prowled the perimeter of the great pit and looked on his work with a critical eye. His permanent smile had vanished at last. He peered down into the depths, then lifted his head and looked up, trying to imagine how it would be, here, when the beanstalk came lancing in through the atmosphere. His in-filling system was all ready, had been ready for weeks. What else could be done in preparation? Nothing. Wait and pray. Merindo shrugged and finally headed back to the array of remote handlers that made up the heart of Tether Control, twenty kilometers from the pit.
“Too damn much imagination,” he grumbled to himself, as he finally settled into his bunk. “Either I trust the man, or I shouldn’t be working for him. Good thing he can’t see me now, I’m as bad as the bride the night before the wedding.”
Luis Merindo might have been less comfortable if he could have seen Rob Merlin at that moment. The central control room in Santiago had one main screen and was flanked by twelve subsidiary ones. Any one of the twelve could be switched with the biggest one. Rob lolled before that screen. His face was pale and gaunt. His left arm ended at the wrist, in a stump wrapped in cloth. On his return from Atlantis a dozen doctors had told him that he needed treatment at once, that the beanstalk could wait.
He had ignored them. They concerned themselves only with Rob’s body; they could not see the white-haired ghost, the man who perched at Rob’s shoulder and told him that the beanstalk must be landed, tethered, and operating according to schedule, before Rob could feel a moment of peace and relaxation.
He sat in the padded control chair, nervously fingering with his right hand the panel of switches before him. He was calling up displays on each of the screens in turn, a reflex action carried on by his fingers independently of his brain.
One more day. Then he could permit the first operation.
He decided that he would run over everything just one more time. After that, he would go to bed. Luis had called earlier, and Rob had emphasized the need for a good night’s sleep before they began the final tether. They would need their brains clear and rested when the time came. Luis was probably back in Quito sleeping like a baby; Rob doubted he would be able to sleep at all.
He flicked in a display of the silent control room in Quito, then went one by one around the geosynch reporting stations. He inspected the caboose last of all, the unmanned mass of equipment that hung at the very end of the beanstalk. Everything was quiet, physical variables well within their tolerances. Even the Sun was behaving itself, with no new flares and prominences to change the density profile of the upper atmosphere.
Rob’s obsessive checks and counter-checks did not go unobserved. Corrie drifted quietly in during the long countdown. She stood behind him without speaking, watching the parade of images as they moved across the big screen. She too had tried, in vain, to persuade Rob to postpone the landing until his condition improved.
Finally Corrie turned and left. She could share only so far in the excitement and the tension that consumed Rob.
One more day, and then the operations could begin to replace his hand. He had given his promise. But would he keep it — or would some new goal emerge to fill his life?
One hour. Contact minus 4,000.
The first abort option had passed. The beanstalk was moving faster now, arcing in towards Earth along the smooth curve of an Archimedean spiral. From a head moving along at ten kilometers a second, the thin filament curved around through more than three hundred degrees to its bulbous tail. Three billion tons of inertia began to make their presence felt. As the beanstalk swung in toward Earth impact, the elements of the cable could not follow their natural free-fall pattern. Instead, tensions were building along the whole length, constraining the diving head to follow an approach path that would turn gradually to the planned landing point at Quito.
Stored elastic energy was growing within the load cable. Already it matched that of a medium-sized fission bomb. If the cable snapped, the energy would release as a shock wave along the length of it.
Rob looked at the readings from the strain gauges set all along the axis of the beanstalk. They still shared low values, negligible compared with their final planned maxima. He switched to the screen that monitored the orbit of the ballast asteroid. Soon it would reach perigee. In thirty minutes it would begin to swing out again, away from Earth. For the moment nothing needed to be done. Rob checked the Doppler broadening from the asteroid observations, confirming that they showed an acceptably low rotation rate for the ballast.
There was still plenty of time for an abort option. The beanstalk had not yet started its final straightening. High-reaction drives attached to the head could swing it away from Earth and curve it clear. When the drives were jettisoned in another forty minutes, at least some part of the stalk must enter Earth’s atmosphere.
It was not only the tensions in the beanstalk cable that were growing as the fly-in continued. Rob could feel a mounting discomfort, like a rock sitting in the pit of his stomach. Nothing on the bridge construction projects had prepared him for this, for the convoluted juggling of multiple forces implied by the landing of the stalk. Although the control panel gave him nominal control of operations, Rob knew that he was actually helpless. Everything depended on the accuracy of the calculations and the realism of the simulations they had done. Nothing that he — that any human — did now could improve the pattern of approach. He was at the center of the Control System, with only one decision left to make: abort, or continue the landing? The simple flip of a binary switch, that was what it all came down to. Rob was feeling less and less able to comprehend all the factors that would guide the decision. After the physical and mental turmoil of the past two weeks his brain felt numbed and slow, incapable of accurate evaluation. He bit his lip until it hurt, focused all his attention on the displays, and waited for the next datum point on his decision tree.
He had never expected to be so isolated. In all his plans, all his thoughts about the landing and tether, Regulo would be in close radio contact, assessing, advising, reassuring. No matter what the record books might show, this project was not Rob Merlin’s; it belonged to Darius Regulo, its originator, its designer, its only begetter.
Rob felt alone in his worries. He was not. In hundreds of outrider ships along the length of the stalk, in other vessels that matched the course of the great ballast weight, and in the hot and cramped offices of Tether Control, men and women sweated over the same display images, frowned at the same incoming data streams, and thanked Fortune that the final abort decision was not theirs to make.
All around the world, people were beginning to watch the sky. It was too soon to see anything; but logic did not control their actions.
Contact minus 600.
With ten minutes to contact, the diving head of the beanstalk reached the upper atmosphere. It entered the ionosphere and began to feel the first effects of frictional heating. Now it was starting to slow in its descent. The long tail, way out beyond synchronous altitude, was already tugging upward to provide a colossal outward tension that would slow all downward motion. The cup that hung at the very end of the beanstalk was moving higher and higher, sling-shotting out from the first approach spiral to stretch away from Earth. Eighty-five thousand kilometers above the surface, it formed the final point of a stalk that reared steadily closer to the vertical.